March 2014

March 30, 2014

The revival of Les Miserables comes weighted with history, and not just the French Revolution as Victor Hugo imagined it: a long running Broadway original, a more recent revival, an Oscar nominated movie just last year. Certainly producers are counting on a familiarity with the material, the show’s rich music covered by many pop vocalists. But with its superb casting and recent trim, this Les Miserables revival at the Imperial Theater is simply stunning.

March 29, 2014

Donald Rumsfeld, for no apparent reason, agreed to allow Fog of War documentarian Errol Morris to interview him. Was it to assure his legacy? We may never know. When the filmmaker asks him that very question after a long evasive interview in the new film Unknown Known opening this week, he evades even that, replying, “That’s a vicious question. Damned if I know.”

Jim Jarmusch, the celebrated indie filmmaker gives the vampire genre a clever tweak in his new movie, Only Lovers Left Alive. If you’ve been around sucking blood for centuries, you’ve probably met history’s most famous characters, Byron, Schubert, to mention a few. The movie pushes this conceit, name dropping with aplomb, or just cracking wise in vampire tropes. Roaming the Tangier medina, Eve (Tilda Swinton) follows the well-worn path of the midcentury dissolute and hip, looking for a fix in the manner of beat legendary figures. Arriving at the “1001 Nights” café, she finds none other than Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) who has a special “Type O,” just what she needs. The café is named after one once owned by Brion Gysin, in the days when William Burroughs resided in the then seedy port hotel, the Muneria. Known as “El Hombre Invisible,” he was a figure of unidentifiable age, seeming to exist on junk alone.

March 26, 2014

“Are you ready for your history lesson,” asked the usher at a recent performance of All the Way at the Neil Simon Theater. Please! All the Way is way more than a history lesson, although it does dramatize a significant part of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency from his taking office after Kennedy’s assassination through the march on Selma, the murders of voting recruiters Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, and his signature achievement, passing The Civil Rights Act. Yes, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Brandon J. Dirden), Sen. Hubert Humphrey (Robert Petkoff), J. Edgar Hoover (Michael Keaton), Governor George Wallace (Rob Campbell) and Lady Bird Johnson (Betsy Aidem) are significant players in the political tableau, which also reveals the requisite wheeling, dealing, and compromise under his leadership. Most of all, this fast-paced and entertaining three hours covering November, 1963-November, 1964, is the occasion to see the extraordinary Bryan Cranston, in his Broadway debut, morph into the role of LBJ, even down to his boxer shorts. Bryan Cranston can take his Tony now.

March 25, 2014

Strident, a woman with whom to reckon, Tyne Daly’s Katharine Gerard is a force of nature. Encased in fur, she’s the refrigerator-sized iceberg in Terrence McNally’sMothers and Sons, a new play that opened at the Golden Theater on Monday. Well, never has a joke carried such heft: if it isn’t one thing, it’s your mother!

Arriving unannounced at the Upper West Side apartment of her dead son’s lover, Cal (a terrific Frederick Weller) now newly married and with a son, she represents every parent who could not understand or accept a gay child. Her only son, Andre died of AIDS in the early scourge of that plague; it’s not an event that can heal, even after decades. And here’s the switch: she is the one alone, ostracized, loveless, and finally embraced. The play, an extension of material McNally first wrote back in the late ‘80’s, is an important social and political history that culminates in being the first Broadway play to feature a gay marriage.

March 20, 2014

As a desperate widow in MTC’s new play, Tales from Red Vienna,Nina Arianda’s Helena Altman is demure in period weeds, even as the gentlemen she services rip her black lace. In her new movie, Rob the Mob, opening this week, Arianda’s Rosie is wily and saucy and naïve as befits a character in a modern “Bonnie & Clyde” story, about a real-life Queens couple deigning to hold up members of the “family” in their social clubs. Her boyfriend, Tommy, in the charming if rough person of Michael Pitt, has this brainstorm sitting in on the trial of John Gotti, that the Mafia, bosses and soldiers, wield no weapons as they play cards, and in the name of his father, he simply and nervously shows up, asks them for their watches and wallets, while she waits in the getaway car. Needless to say, this daring prank comes to no good end for the young lovers.

March 18, 2014

The illuminating documentary Big Men tells a variation of the oil story in Africa. Nigeria was an example of fifty years of oil discovery, with busted pipelines, and rampant pollution, a result of the business of oil. Ghana was next in line for oil extraction. Attracted to this story, filmmaker Rachel Boynton asks the tough questions of the “big men,” African government officials and American companies like Kosmos, that wish to profit. These characters appear so willing to explain their greed on camera. I asked Boynton the obvious: what’s a nice girl like you doing with a subject like this?

March 17, 2014

Introducing a new documentary at HBO, “Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert,” Executive Director Sheila Nevins paused at the podium to ask Trent Gilbert whether or not he was feeling safe. The dimpled 4 year old who nearly steals the show from his mom, was seated in the back of the screening room, about to see the movie about the challenges facing his family, mom as well as his two older sisters, as they struggle to live on the $9.49/ per hour mom makes working at an elder care facility. The kids are well mannered and cooperative with the filmmakers, Shari Cookson and Nick Doob, as they follow the family around for a year, part of The Shriver Report, from home in a trailer, to child care, and in and out of various cars including the one driven by their dad who does not live with them while Katrina has to help pay for his gas. This life in Chattanooga, Tennessee is not the worst, not utter poverty, it is just the way it is for this ambitious mother who is seen as emblematic of 42 million American mothers out there, trying.

March 14, 2014

Filmmaker provocateur Lars von Trier’s latest movie exceeds even his own perversions. The title, Nymphomaniac, tells you much. A troubled woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is rescued and helped to convalescing by a professorial type (Stellan Skarsgard). She explains her despair, recounting the history of her sexuality. Another man might pounce, but the scene remains cerebral, she in bed, he by her side. The voice of von Trier, he listens to each anecdote, responding with correlatives in science, in nature, in the world of ideas, while the viewer is treated to visual flashbacks starring Stacy Martin; in her first movie, as young Joe, she engages in a game with a classmate whereby she has sex with as many men on a moving train as possible, the prize, a bag of candies. Dressed in demure dresses and knee socks, Joe becomes the traditional object of the male gaze, allowing von Trier to muse about the human organism as an anthropologist might.

March 13, 2014

Looks like hell is a step up, as the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s mid century allegory step off the elevator into a swank upscale loft in the Pearl Theater Company’s stylish production of No Exit. A first New York revival since its award winning Broadway debut in 1946, the play, adapted from the French by Paul Bowles, is freshened up: a statue of Napoleon from the original is now a modernist sculpture, a microcosm of the loft space. In this peculiar art piece, the rectangular shoebox-sized spaces are multiplied and piled up, like apartments in a high rise, reflecting the dwelling where three characters discuss life’s meaning, as it were, romping about, posing on three divans. The ensemble, featuring Bradford Cover, Jolly Abraham, Sameerah Luqmaan-Harris, and Pete McElligott, is good at conveying this imagined post-death dialogue. And this being 2014, the politics are less specific than Sartre’s post-war vision of eternity, but the mood could not be more focused. Behind a scrim on both sides of the stage, the detritus of lives, broken furnishings, and just plain stuff are a reminder: You won’t need them here.